How I reduced funds for monthly cleaning of offices from N137m to N11m – Soludo

• Governors need to reduce long convoys, do away with waste – Soludo
• He said governors must live according to prevailing realities

Charles Soludo, governor of Anambra state, says it’s imperative for members of the nation’s political class to change their lifestyle to reflect the country’s current reality as it regards the removal of subsidy on petrol.

Soludo noted that cost of governance must be reduced and extravagance done away with as it’s now insensitive for state governors to live in unjustifiable affluence while the citizens grapple with hardship.

The governor said this while addressing state house correspondents after the National Economic Council (NEC) meeting at the presidential villa in Abuja on Thursday.

“I think it’s an omnibus concept, and it’s not something you sit down in a meeting to legislate for each and every state,” he said.

“But the fact that the council recognises that this is an issue that each tier of government should now focus on as an area of concern.

Soludo added that governors and members of council spoke to themselves about how everyone needs to adhere to the austerity measures of the times and partake in the sacrifices being asked of the people.

“And the fact that even amongst ourselves, almost like in a peer review kind of setting, we are talking to ourselves,” he said.

“Hey gentlemen, we would need to be sensitive to the times, we need to live within the average of the people that we’re governing and so on and so forth and knock off the waste and the irrelevancies so to speak.

“I mean, I would like to give you a simple example. We are not going to legislate for everybody, everybody is to go and look into his mind.

“When I assumed office, for example, it was costing about N137 million every month to clean up public offices, and so on.

“Today, in Anambra we’re doing N11 million a month from N137 million on a monthly basis, this is just an illustration.

“It’s a thing that we’re persuading each and every one of us to look into, that we should check our books and look ourselves in the mirror and move with the times.

“So it is not that the council sat and began to prescribe, you have 12 number of advisors or five…we didn’t get to that but each person will do that”